Author - Dr. Nitin Gupte

Sitting Is As Bad For The Heart As Smoking!

Dr. James Levine, director of the Mayo Clinic, Arizona State University Obesity Solutions Initiative and inventor of the treadmill desk, has been studying the adverse effects of our increasingly sedentary lifestyles for years and has summed up his findings in two sentences.

“Sitting is more dangerous than smoking, kills more people than HIV and is more treacherous than parachuting. We are sitting ourselves to death.”

Levine is credited with coining that mantra — “sitting is the new smoking” — but he’s not the only one who believes it. Researchers have found and continue to find evidence that prolonged sitting increases the risk of developing several serious illnesses like various types of cancer, heart disease and type 2 diabetes.

Studies have repeatedly shown that the effects of long-term sitting are not reversible through exercise, eating and living healthy. Sitting, like smoking, is very clearly bad for our health and the only way to minimize the risk is to limit our sitting time each day.

You will surely know a few people who apparently lived and ate healthy and exercised regularly but still suffered from a heart attack (infarct) and wondered what may have caused these heart attacks. The reason may well have been sitting long hours at a desk job for years.

So even if you exercise for an hour or more regularly and eat healthy, you could still be susceptible to develop diabetes or to die of heart disease or various cancers, if you sit for long hours for years.